Deconstructing the Ailment

ABSTRACT

This essay explores an illness in a health care professional through lenses of role flexibility and professional accountability. It highlights the process of contemplation about the dual identifications implicit in the experience of being both a professional and a patient within one health care delivery system. This can be a position of standing on the borders of possibility. Thus, the dilemma of a “wounded healer” may challenge some assumptions inherent in the giving and receiving of care as well as grant us some regard for the power shifts within the management of our patients and of ourselves. The experience that one's ailment can be an opportunity-to explore notions of sickness and health or to help to tease out the limits or the potential impact of our responsibility toward that which we name disease and cure-may be the more salient message.

Key Words:

• Personal narrative/medical illness
• wounded healer
• reflective practitioner